franchise / enfranchise / disenfranchise

2 February 2026

The English franchise is a borrowing of an Anglo-Norman word, which could mean freedom in various contexts. It could mean freedom as opposed to serfdom; a special right, privilege, or exemption; a corporate body, such as a town or guild; citizenship or membership in a corporate body; or an area of land in which such privileges or corporate bodies could operate. Franchise could mean nobility of character. These senses were all imported into English.

We see the Middle English fraunchise in a life of St. Edmund in the South English Legendary, written c. 1300:

Wel ofte he bad þe kingue and his : ȝif it were heore wille,
Þat huy ne weorreden nouȝt a·ȝein holi churche : ake laten hire beo stille
In hire fraunchise and in pays : asc heo hadde i-beo ȝare.

(Very often he asked the king and his, if were their will, that they not war against the holy church, but to grant her tranquility in her franchise and in peace, as she had before.)

The French verb form, franchir, was brought into English at about the same time, as well. A bit later however, by the early fifteenth century, the French enfraunchir was also borrowed into English, and that would become the English verb to enfranchise, eventually replacing the form to franchise. It is commonly thought that this verb is a combination of en- + franchise, but that combination occurred in French, and English borrowed the already combined form.

In contrast, the addition of the prefix dis- to the verb, meaning to deprive someone of a right, occurred in English. We see disfranchise by the mid fifteenth century and disenfranchise by the mid seventeenth.

The sense of franchise meaning a right or privilege specialized to refer to particular such rights, for instance the right to vote, was in place by 1769. In early use this was often in the phrase elective franchise. And the sense of the right to operate a business under a certain brand, such as a sports or fast-food franchise, is in place by the late nineteenth century.

Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 Phase 2, 2006–28, s.v., franchise, n., franchir, v.; AND2 Phase 1, 2000–06, s.v. enfranchir, v.

Horstmann, Carl, ed. “St. Eadmund þe Confessor.” The Early South English Legendary. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1887, lines 515–17, 446. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud 108. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Middle English Dictionary, 8 October 2025, s.v. fraunchis(e, n., fraunchisen, v.,enfraunchisen, v., disfraunchisen, v.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2009, s.v. franchise, n., franchise, v.; 1891, s.v. enfranchise, v.; 1896, s.v. disenfranchise, v., disfranchise, v.

Photo credit: Stu Pendousmat, 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.